Workshop Wednesday: Egg Decoration With A Twist

I was looking for an alternative way to decorate eggs for Easter with my son. Not having done it before I was frankly a bit unsure about doing the whole egg blowing thing.

Then I came across this idea on the internet for doing it with crayons, using the heat from the boiled egg to melt the crayon. Genius. Would it work with a six year old, or would it be a disaster? The only way to find out was to try it.

For a wider variety of ways to decorate eggs for Easter, check out Tamsin Oxford's feature tomorrow at 1pm.

To do this project you will need:

eggs

tongs

crayons

egg carton or bottle top

If you haven't got an egg carton you can use to put the hot egg in while you're working, then I've been told a bottle top (like you kind you get off a 2litre bottle of fizzy pop) will do the job.

Being a cautious person and not wanting to waste eggs unnecessarily, I only boiled two eggs to start with. This was a bit of a mistake actually, as I probably left them in too long and just before I took them out of the pan, one of the eggs cracked. This meant we only had one egg to work on.

Which my son jealously guarded. Mummy was not allowed to touch HIS egg. So I only got to live this one vicariously.

The tongs are very necessary to get the egg out of the pan, and to move it around while you are working. The boiled egg stays extremely hot for quite a while. This impressed my son a great deal, who thought it was really cool to be working with a scorching hot egg (he only touched it once!).

That it could burn gave the project a frission of danger that ordinary egg decorating wouldn't have. And that made it really 'cool', apparently.

Then all you have to do is press down on the eggshell with the crayon and it will melt directly onto the egg. You can build up quite a few layers of colour in this way too, and allow it to run down from the top to create a 'dripping' effect.

My son chose to decorate his with octopus and jellyfish rather than flowers, although the end result looks pretty much the same to me. But sssh, don't tell him!

He happily worked on his egg while I did the dishes. All I had to do was turn the egg now and again, so he could get to another clear patch.

I used some old eggs for this, that were a bit past their use by date although they hadn't gone off. And they were from Iceland so in the clear plastic carton. This is something I have to stress I normally try to avoid, as I don't like adding to the plastic waste there already is.

But in this case I think it worked well as I was able to cut out the little egg holder bit and use it as a stand for the egg.

Alternatively, if I'd used a cardboard carton, I probably would have painted it to use as a holder.

One other thing that impressed me using this method is that the colours stay quite strong. Also the texture of the crayon is quite nice.

3 comments

Sho

oh wat a fantastic idea and one I wish I'd thought of / heard about when my girls were smaller! (we went the usual German route of blowing countless eggs...)
I guess you could use a normal egg cup to rest the eggs in? Can any crayons be used or do they have to be the genuine wax article? (I still have some, I might try this out)
And I'm also guessing that if you have enough crayons, time, patience, you could layer up the colours, cover the egg and scratch designs?
I really love this idea so thanks for posting it. In fact I've decided. I'm definitely having a go. But don't tell my teenagers they'll think I'm uncool!

Go for it! I just used some crayons that were in son's box. I think they came in one of those little colouring packs you get when you got a restaurant to keep kids occupied. So nothing special.
If you have a kid with a bit of patience, which I didn't, or as an adult what you can do is just hold the crayon on the top of the egg and let it drip down. Do that with different colours for a bit of a trippy effect!
I don't own an egg cup.

What do you think?

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